


Winter Soldier: Ghost Protocol

by doctorenterprise



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Competent Spy Natasha Romanov, Criminal With A Heart of Gold Bucky Barnes, Fist Fights, Minor League Hacker Steve Rogers, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol AU, Prison, Surveillance, Tumblr Prompt, is bucky barnes just ethan hunt with more hydra and less bad hair?, the answer is apparently yes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-09
Updated: 2018-05-09
Packaged: 2019-05-04 07:53:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14588451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctorenterprise/pseuds/doctorenterprise
Summary: Literally the first seven minutes of Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol except Bucky is Ethan Hunt, Steve is Simon Pegg, and Natasha is the spy who does all the actual work. Also, Steve and Bucky are in love. It's a prison break in the name of love.





	Winter Soldier: Ghost Protocol

It’s quiet in cell block C. Quiet enough that the crack of rock on cement rattles around Bucky’s cell like pennies in a tin can. He breathes silently, jerking his arm to throw the rock at just the right angle to ricochet off the wall, against the window sill, and back into his open palm. 

He pauses. Listenes. Whips the rock again, barely paying attention but perfectly calculating the necessary trajectory for the rock to find its way back to his palm.

Outside, in a van parked half a block from the fenced in yard he had yet to be allowed into, a man toggles between surveillance screens and taps away at a keyboard. The security screens in the guard’s office flicker, unnoticed. 

Ten cells away, a door unlocks and swings out slowly. A prisoner steps into the hall, not quite believing his luck. The man in the van grins. Bucky tosses his rock again, patient.

The prisoner creeps down the hallway.

“Hei! Ce dracu faci?” Another prisoner shouts, alerting a nearby guard. The first prisoner shushes him, but it’s too late.

Bucky throws the rock again.

The guard opens the door to the cell block and stalks inside. “Du-te dracului înapoi în celula ta, căţea!”

The door slams closed open behind him. Bucky presses his lips together.  _Mistake_.

The man in the van smirks, presses three keys on his keyboard, and mutters, “Lets give you a few friends to play with.”

The remaining doors in the cell block swing open. The guard blanches and is immediately thrown to the ground by four prisoners. Bucky listens. The man in the van winces at his surveillance screen.

Far beneath the prison, a red-haired woman sloshes through sludge she doesn’t care to identify in a tunnel. The man in the van presses the device in his ear, “Nat, how are you doing?”

“How do you think? I’m in a sewer,” she bites back. She keeps jogging.

Above, the riot is in full swing. Bucky’s rock finds its way back this his fist and he pauses before tossing it again. Listens hard. 

In the guards’ office, the security screens light up green - all cells open. Bucky tosses his rock. Waits.

Below the prison, the red-haired woman presses her walkie-talkie. “I’m in position. Moved to phase two.”

The man in the van clicks two buttons and Dean Martin’s ‘Ain’t That A Kick In The Head’ blares through the prison speaker system. Bucky’s lip quirks up in the barest hint of a smirk.

His cell door clangs open. He doesn’t toss the rock. Stands and walks calmly to the door, wedges the rock back into his cell wall. Steps outside.

He walks up to the railing at the edge of the hallway, leans his forearms against it for a moment, and vaults over with practiced grace. He lands neatly on the level below, looks towards the door. It opens. He follows the path being so kindly cleared for him. 

He stops. Hesitates. Sighs.

And turns back. The man in the van throws up his hands - of course. Of course he turns back. 

“W-what are you doing?” The man in the van ask the screen hysterically.

“What’s wrong, Steve?” The red-haired woman asks.

“He’s not going to the extraction point!”

“Relax, he knows what he’s doing.”

Bucky walks up to the door separating his calm, empty cell block from the riot-filled one next door. He whirls his fingers at the camera. In the van, Steve exclaims, “No, I won’t open that door, thank you very much! I won’t.”

Bucky whirls his fingers again. Glares at the camera. In the van, Steve huffs. “I’m not opening it.”

Bucky rolls his eyes, leans again the railing, easy as can be. Steve glares at the screen. “Oh, we’re gonna wait? We’re gonna wait.”

Bucky waits. Waits some more. Holds his fist up to the camera.

“Okay, fine! Fine!” Steve opens the door. Bucky walks through with a saucy wink. Stalks past the guards’ office without so much as a glance their way as they shout into phones and scramble for solutions. “Nat, we’re gonna have a  _slight_  delay.”

Bucky plows through the next door into the riot, fists swinging the deadly accuracy. Two men go down, three more a dodged, and he hops over a guard whose baton is swinging quickly for his shins. He leaps through the next door and slams it behind him.

He slips into the last cell and scans the room. “Pietro?”

A young, terrified man stands up from behind a bunk and peers at him. “Sa mergem.”

“Este prea periculos.”

“Sa  _mergem_.”

The young man follows him into the hallway. The riot has the young man frozen in his tracks, so Bucky grabs him by the collar and drags him like a sack of potatoes.

“What’s he doing?” Nat asks from below the prison. 

Steve huffs. “I don’t know, but somehow I’m helping him.”

“Let’s just hope he’s where he should be when the song ends.”

Steve’s eyes bulge out in the privacy of his cramped surveillance van. He sees Bucky’s fist in some young kid’s shirt, dragging him through an all-out brawl. “Uh, we have a passenger?”

Nat sighs into the comm set. Steve wholeheartedly agrees. 

A punch lands squarely on the kid’s nose and he goes down like a ton of bricks. Bucky immediately engages, only momentarily overcome by five men with six inches and 50 pounds on him. The kid scrambles through the hall on his palms and knees as Bucky fights himself free. 

He scrapes the kid up off the floor and barrels for the door, gesturing urgently at the camera. The door opens. He and the kid squeak through without a moment to spare.

But. The guards have left their office. It’s not a problem for long, especially when the kid shouts, “În spatele tău!” and Bucky turns just in time to lay waste to a guard whose baton was two inches from his cranium. 

Bucky and the kid run like their damn lives depend on it - and they do. The rest of the prison is mostly quiet as they slip into an unoccupied closet and the kid starts to freak out.

“Suntem morți! Suntem morți! Ne vor ucide!“

“Destul,” Bucky barks. The kid falls silent. Bucky listens. A pipe rattles. 

Bucky hauls the kid three feet over just as the floor beneath him disintegrates and falls away beneath his feet. The kid peers into the newly formed hole in awe and Bucky jerks him back just as an arrow on a wire shoots past his face and plants itself in the ceiling. 

He leans over the hole. Smirks. “Vaduva Neagra.”

She laughs, rolls her eyes. “Inghetata din suc.”

Bucky scowls and turns his attention to the kid instead. Shows him how to grab the wire and slide down safely. The kid stares at him blankly.  _Are you fucking kidding me_ , he face says. Bucky thrusts the wire into his hands.

The kid screams the whole way down. Lands on his ass. Bucky and Nat stifle their smiles. Bucky lands with the grace of a cat. Brushes non-existent fluff off his shoulder.

“Mișcare. Let’s go.”

“Sargent Barnes,” Nat greets. He narrows his eyes at her. She blinks once. He huffs. She’s trustworthy.

The three of them sprint down the sewer towards the exit Nat came through. It’s filthy work but Bucky’s blood is pumping. Faster and faster the closer they get. 

The come out a manhole on the vacant side of the surveillance van. Nat wipes a single smear of dirt off her cheek. Bucky pulls his hair back off his face with a tie he plucked from her wrist without her notice. He catches her eye as he pulls the band tight.  _Ah_. She noticed.

The kid is covered in sewage from head to toe.  _Amateur_ , Bucky thinks fondly.

The door to the van slips open in the dead of the night and Bucky straightens. He’s not nervous. He has no reason to be. He’s not.

Bluer eyes than the fucking August sky in Georgia crinkle at him from inside the van and his whole body feels weightless.

“Hey, jerk,” Steve grins. Bucky’s knees weaken.

“Punk,” he breathes. Leans into the van, sinks his teeth into Steve’s lower lip in a long-overdue kiss. “Thanks for the assist.”

Steve laughs into his mouth and kisses him harder. He pulls back and there’s more emotion there than Bucky is prepared to handle five seconds after leaving the prison he’s spent the last three years waiting in. Steve kisses him again and sighs.

“You smell like shit.”

 _Okay_ , Bucky thinks.  _Alright. Alright._

 


End file.
